Summary
“Moulin Rouge” raises the stakes a little with some decent action, gnarly deaths, and a couple of betrayals. There are still some issues, but the second season of Daryl Dixon is finding a rhythm here.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon is improving, so that’s something. Season 2 is still wildly imperfect, but I didn’t spend Episode 2, “Moulin Rouge”, getting aggravated about basic logical leaps, which I’ll take as a positive. There’s action, a couple of gnarly kills, and a handful of betrayals — obvious though they may be — that raise the stakes effectively. Carol’s inclusion still feels forced, but you know what AMC is like — fans enjoy this relationship, so whatever it takes to give them more of it is, apparently, fair game.
Both halves of the narrative are still completely separate for now, but they’re getting much closer to overlapping, so let’s break down the latest pitstops in Daryl and Carol’s respective adventures.
Losang’s Play
I’ll say this for the Nest — it cuts a strikingly beautiful image, which is probably why “Moulin Rouge” returns to it again and again. I wouldn’t want to live there, though, and Laurent might not either. With Daryl having impressed and excited him either further thanks to his rescue mission in the premiere, there’s a sense that wherever he goes the young Messiah will follow, and if that includes leaving the Nest to try and reunite with Carol and his friends, well, that’s something that Losang might have to consider.
Promptly, Laurent goes missing. Isabelle wakes up in the night to find him gone, a very suspicious-looking rope still dangling from his window, sand in the room implying someone climbed in to grab him, and testimony from a guard that someone with a tattooed face knocked him unconscious. It’s all rather convenient, but Daryl, Fallou, and Isabelle nonetheless take the bait, leaving the Nest to pursue Laurent and what they presume are Genet and her men.
This is, of course, a ruse. A traumatized Emile has been instructed to ambush and assassinate Daryl. Isabella and Fallou being there makes the matter much more complicated, though, and our heroes are predictably able to get the upper hand. Emile — who, during his captivity, was forced to watch Genet’s experiments on the other captives — reveals that the next day, Losang intends to prove Laurent is the chosen one in a ceremony that’ll involve him being bitten by a walker and, they hope, resisting the infection.
Since the idea of Laurent as a Messianic figure is a bit farfetched, Daryl and Isabelle know this can’t happen, so they need to rush back to the Nest to free him. Unfortunately, the place is cut off until the tide goes out, leaving Daryl and Isabelle with nothing to do but share a kiss as Fallou goes to secure a perimeter.
“Moulin Rouge” gets a lot of visual mileage out of the Nest
A Brief Stop In Greenland
Meanwhile, Carol and Ash land in Greenland and are quickly accosted by mossy plains walkers, but are saved by a couple of the locals, Eun and Hanna. These guys have yet another local name for the walkers — Tupilaq, a flesh-eating beast from Inuit myth. Like almost every random side character in The Walking Dead history, these two have been on their own for much too long.
They’re climate scientists, for a start, which should raise some alarm bells. But they’re also just nuts in a garden-variety way too. Carol becomes suspicious immediately, and rightly so. Hanna’s opening gambit is to imply that maybe most of the world’s population dying and reanimating as zombies is Mother Nature fighting back against humanity’s various abuses. When she turns Carol’s crossbow on her and reveals that she has been instructed by Eun to murder her, it’s hardly a surprise.
Eun has other plans for Ash. She believes, rather oddly for a scientist, that she and Hanna getting pregnant will somehow constitute a rebirth of all mankind, and she’s first up. Ash, having just been quite vulnerable after revealing the loss of his child, isn’t exactly thrilled to be asked to sire a new one.
This all ends as quickly as it began. Eun returns to find Hanna deliberating over killing Carol, and in a bit of a scuffle, Hanna fires an arrow through Eun’s forehead, pinning her to the locker behind her. Carol offers to take Hanna with them, but as they’re walking to the plane where Ash is chained up, he fires a flare at Hanna which lodges in her neck and torches her brain. It’s a gnarly death, but it would have been nice to spend a bit longer with Eun and Hanna and get a better sense of their weird dynamic (why is Hanna so subservient to Eun? What did they plan to do with the babies in the remote Greenland wilderness? Daryl Dixon Season 2, Episode 2 doesn’t consider these especially interesting dramatic questions, I guess.)
Ash (Manish Dayal) and Eun (Minami Bages) have a moment
Carol and Ash Land In Paris
After only a single brief stop — does that tiny plane have the capacity for this journey? — Carol and Ash touch down in France.
Is this a bit silly? Sure, maybe. It’s sillier still that they manage to land about five minutes away from where they need to be. Carol, after ditching Ash, who is adamant about waiting with the plane for at least the next two weeks until she returns, cuts a hole in one of the grain bags on the back of a truck so it leads her to where Genet’s goons are rounding up the locals for predictably nefarious purposes. Carol is promptly caught and bundled in the back of a truck with some other successful “volunteers”.
In the truck, Carol meets Remy, a former English teacher who has a naively rosy idea of Genet’s “New France”. When his husband, who is traveling in the other truck, is taken elsewhere, he realizes that things might not be exactly as they seem.
And he’s right! Genet is busying herself savagely torturing Codron with a corkscrew, trying to withdraw information that he either doesn’t have or isn’t willing to part with. Either way, she’s clearly in it for pleasure at this point, which isn’t a quality you necessarily want in a leader. With Carol having caught up to the Big Bad in record time, that should set up a fun confrontation between the two down the line.
And Another Thing…
Some other things to note in “Moulin Rouge” that didn’t fit into the recap:
- Sylvie figures out that something is amiss at the Nest and follows one of the staff to Laurent’s secret hiding place. Unfortunately, Losang is there keeping an eye on things.
- It’s revealed a bit later that while Losang arranged the plan to have Daryl lured away from the Nest, he didn’t instruct Emile to kill him. That was Jacinta. Losang is visibly fuming, and while he seems to come around to the idea, are we teeing up Jacinta as an even more ruthless potential villain?
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